In many businesses, various planning processes occur throughout the business organization. For example, there may be a planning process that a sales group of the business is responsible to perform, a planning process that a financial or accounting group of the business is responsible to perform, and a planning process that a purchasing group of the business is responsible to perform. Various other planning processes may also be performed by these and other groups within and perhaps outside the business.
In many cases, there are dependencies between the various planning and forecasting processes. For example, the planning process of a sales group may depend on a planning process of an accounting group, because the sales group may need to know a budget it-will be given for an up-coming time period. In other words, the planning activities being performed by one organization may need to be coordinated with the planning activities of another organization. In such cases, an integration of planning functionality between various groups may be desirable. However, in a typical business, different groups may use different computer planning tools, and the integration among these tools may not be designed into the system.
A portal is a computer navigation tool, and is commonly used within enterprise computing systems as a way of enabling user access to various networked resources. For example, a portal may contain a user interface view that provides a user with access to selected information that the user may need to access during a normal day's work. In addition, portal systems for an organization may be role-based, which means that users with an identified role within the organization may be presented with portal views that are specifically designed to meet the particular needs of the role of that user, and different users with different roles may have different portal views. In addition, the portal may be designed to have various views that provide different types of information that the user may want to access, depending on the task that the user is performing. For example, a role-based portal designed for a sales user may have a sales lead view, and another view that provides access to financial information in a format that is tailored to the needs of the sales user. Portals in some cases also provide access to planning tools that a user may need to access.